Archive for September, 2013

“Profit motive” means very simply: you give less than you take. If you give less than you take, you grow mean and stingy. Everybody suffers. Morality is totally impossible.

—Lew Welch

Money is death. Ask yourself why banks and currency use the same images as tombstones.

—Lew Welch

The money. It is almost over. Blessed be.

We can see this, rightly, if we just look, right, at the current roil of news.

—First, in re the latest eternal recurrence of the American debt limit/grand bargain/ACA/government shutdown/blah-de-blah kabuki.

Senator Ted Cruz, he read Green Eggs And Ham, on the floor of the Senate. And proved that he did not understand it. At all. And that he is as run-amok nuts as a schoolyard flasher.

Cruz, and his fellow senators Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, and Ayn Rand Paul: all of them are non-sane; de-evolved; deeply, deeply, stupid. They are the Four Stooges of the 21st Century. With Cruz as the really fat and oafish Stooge, the one with the flat-top, who finds it difficult to even drool properly.

When people in other nations regard a person like Cruz, they clamor to know why their borders cannot be immediately and permanently sealed, against the advent of any and all Americans.

Extraterrestrials, meanwhile, have hastily constructed a hyperspace bypass, so that none of them need come anywhere near this planet.

The photo reproduced above, it proves absolutely that Cruz is a mentally divergent knuckledragger. An atavist who grunts and grinds in a world 2000 years long gone. For he is calling, there, down upon his knees, for divine assistance from one Jesus of Nazareth—a millennially long-gone, thoroughly mortal, Jewish prophet; pressganged, upon his death, by an ambitious toadstool of a Saul of Tarsus, into serving as cat’s-paw for some new and improved Sun King faith.

But of course, in truth, what Stooge Cruz is here really doing, upon his knees, before the White House, is calling upon all and every deity—Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Beelzebub, anyfuckingbody, even frigging Cthulhu—to get the goddam black man out of the White House.

For Ted Cruz, like anybody and everybody associated with, or even once fleetingly sympathetic with, the fabled “Tea Party,” is a five-star, glow-in-the-dark, racist.

If you could manage, some deep dark night, to burst into his bedroom, and shine a black light onto his forehead, before he might Take Precautions, you would find, stenciled there, on his forehead, as is stenciled upon the forehead of anybody and everybody ever associated with the Tea Party, these words: “I Hate Ni**ers.”

Cruz hates anything black. And, most especially, the black man in the White House. So much so that he, like his fellow five-star glow-in-the-dark racists Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, Ayn Rand Paul, and any and all persons ever even remotely associated or even fleetingly sympathetic with the Tea Party, is intent on making sure that the United States is transformed, economically, into Zimbabwe. Rather than let any dollars, touch the black man’s hands. They would first deny the black man the money to run the federal government . . . and they would deny it solely because he is black. That was the message and import of the fabled Cruz Green Eggs And Ham flaccidbuster. They are next intent on insuring that the black man cannot pay the nation’s debts. By refusing to raise the debt-ceiling limit. Thereby crashing and burning not only the federal government, but also the American economy . . . and, as my colleague has been cassandraing for the past umpteen-years, the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

But Cruz and Co., they don’t care. They are perfectly willing to stand in the fire. Even as it consumes them. So long as it first burns the black man.

—Next, there’s the pope. Something has gone seriously wrong with the fellow. So much so, that they’re probably going to have to poison him.

We first understood he’d gone stone-mad when one of his sub-primates emerged from some catacomb to pronounce priestly celibacy and marriage-eschewing “tradition,” rather than dogma. That means, the catacomber explained, that these things are not essential god-ordained ways to be a Catholic. But instead just something they do. And therefore they can change their minds about it, whenever they feel like it.

Then the pope himself, suddenly roared out of the pope-hole, to give an interview in which he told Catholic primates, prelates, and random assorted lay-nimrods, that people, like them, “obsessed” with abortion, birth control, gay people, and the like, should put a cork in it. He said that, in his popedom, he’s not going to talk about those things. Because they’re boring and trivial. And if people don’t like that, well, they can just bugger right off.

Finally, the new popeling, he seized the microphone, at some radio station, to rant, correctly, that money is “the dung of the devil”:

Money sickens our minds, poisons our thoughts, even poisons our faith, leading us down the path of jealousy, quarrels, suspicion and conflict. It drives to idle words and pointless discussions.

We can never serve God and money at the same time. It is not possible: either one or the other. This is not Communism. It is the true Gospel! They are the Lord’s words.

Money begins by offering a sense of well-being. Then you feel important and vanity comes. This vanity is useless, but still you think you are important. And after vanity comes pride. Those are the three steps: wealth, vanity, and pride.

“But, Father, I read the Ten Commandments and they say nothing about the evils of money. Against which Commandment do you sin when you do something for money?” Against the first one! You worship a false idol. And this is the reason: because money becomes an idol and you worship it. And that’s why Jesus tells us that you cannot serve money and the living God: either one or the other.

The early Fathers of the Church, in the 3rd Century, around the year 200 or 300, put it in a very blunt way, calling money ‘the dung of the devil’. And so it is. Because it turns us idolatrous, fills our thoughts with pride, and leads us away from our faith.

Holy fuck! It was bad enough that the guy opened his yap to say no war in Syria. Not even the Big Hat during WWII said stop the war: in fact, that cretin got down on his knees and thanked god when the Nazis invaded the USSR, imploring the Big Guy In The Sky to grant the Germans “total victory.”

Why can’t this pope behave like that?

But no.

Not only does he say stop the bomb-rain, but now he’s on about money.

Clearly, something’s going to have to go into his soup.

—Finally, it is a fact that there exists five times as much debt in this world, as there exists money. And anyone who has evolved beyond even Cruz-level can quickly apprehend—no matter how deficient their math skills—that this is a hole from which it is not possible to emerge.

In this, this here nation, the United States nation, it is Vitally Important that, if you hear in your head little nonexistent voices, and you know your brain is being bombarded by microwaves beamed by random people you encountered on a plane, and you shoot out people’s tires, and you also fire rounds through the ceiling, and you occasionally conceive a need to destroy nightclub furniture, and you jack-off 18 hours a day pretending you’re a serial killer for the United States armed forces in Call To Duty, and you nurse unexplained grievances against all and sundry, and you carry a gun in your waistband at all times because you know people want to steal your shit, and your friends all say they will remember you best serving as a full-time human funnel for Heineken beer . . . that you be showered with permits to carry firearms, and be gifted with buttloads of “secret” clearances into secure government facilities.

I think I was 17; maybe 18. Pretty much too young, to yet be captured, by anything. When it was that I, nearly twenty years on, encountered the late ’70s Mao interview, where he repeated those words.

The interview, it was in something like People’s Daily, or the Guardian, or the Atlantic. I don’t any more remember.

The long and lively piece, the one I wrote, based on this late-70s-something Mao interview, it’s probably somewhere down there. Among all those many boxes. There in the basement. But, I know now, I am never going to go through those boxes. Too old; too enervated; I no longer care. Those boxes: they’ll either be tossed, or combed through by heirs.

Some young Chinese woman, there in the Cultural Revolution, there in the late 1970s, got through to Mao; and Mao, bless his heart, always with a weakness for young women, gave her a piece of his time.

What came through in that late-70s interview, with this young woman, is that, yeah, Mao, he had succeeded in forever banishing the white rat bastards from out of the Middle Kingdom, cut the ties of the foot-binding, scythed baldly boldly brutally through millennially class-crusted Chinese society, and, rightly, levelled it.

But, Mao: he weren’t happy.

For, like any good, real Communist, he yearned for the apotheosis: which, in Marxist theory—and Mao was definitely a Marxist—is anarchism.

Mao, in this interview, made it very clear, that he wanted the authoritarian state, that he had assembled, torn right down to the ground.

“Let a thousand flowers bloom,” he repeated, some twenty years on, to this young woman.

Which, in Americanese, might be translated as “go your own way.”

Mao, here, once he’d had it all: he didn’t want people to be like him. He wanted them to be like themselves.

Sometimes, for reasons I don’t feel like disclosing here, at least right now, I read this intertubes thing called laist, self-described as a Los Angeles-centric web portal covering “local news, events, food and entertainment; targeted at young urbanites.”

A worthy thing about these people, is that they have a sense of humor about themselves.

For instance, they offer a recurring feature dubbed “Overheard In LA.” In which readers submit things they have heard fellow Lost Angels emitting, while out and about.

And this stuff: it’s pretty much jaw-dropping. What they reveal about themselves.

And a coupla hand-claps, for them, for that.

For we would never, for instance, get anything anywhere near like this, out of New York City. For those people are so arrogant, so supremely unaware, they could never permit, such naked self-reflection.

Anyway. Here’s a sampling. Culled from the past couple months or so, of “Overheard In LA.”